BP 1.5 & bbpress 2 (site wide) slugs

Sorry if this issue has been raised somewhere else, couldn’t find anything about it.

I’ve installing bbpress 2 with bp 1.5 (fresh test install), when I choose to install the site wide forums the only way to use them is to create an alternate slug with bbpress (eg discussion), which it can be accessed from, but the slug “forums” is the obvious choice for a site wide forum. Also this option keeps the “site.com/forums” page with an alert that this component is not setup. Not nice!

If I try to use a different page for BP’s forum page, and then use the slug “forums” for bbpress, all it gets is the blank forums page. I had tried using “none” as the BP forum page, but it didn’t like that, and didn’t change anything.

Its also a bit strange that even after I install the site wide bbpress forum, it still asks if you want to install it in the BP “Forum” option.

Am I missing something here? Is there a way to use site.com/forums for bbpress site wide forums.

I’m not sure if this is correct so you’d probably want to wait for a developer to answer, but the way I got it to work (because I also agree forums is the best name/slug) is to delete the Forums page that BP created. Initially I also got a blank page with just the title, but when I permanently deleted it the bbPress forums showed up as normal.

To answer your second question, the BP forums installation page went away after I disabled the group forums component in BP settings.

Group forums are separated by groups. Group forums require users to be part of the group in order to use the forum. This method can be good if you want to restrict usage of specific forums to specific groups of people.

Site wide forums is one centralised forum where users do not have to be part of a group in order to use it. This method is more like a regular forum.

When installing buddypress you can enable the forum component (doing so will give you the built in function for installing bbpress in either form), and later remove it in order to use site wide forums with the /forums slug.

Once its installed, delete the page “forums”, ensure its removed from the page trash.

Go to Buddypress > Components, and uncheck “Discussion Forums” and click save in order to disable to buddypress (group) forum component.

Double check that bbpress is using “forums” as the Forums base.

Go to permalinks and save to update.

Navigate to /forums on your site and you should be able to see the site wide forums. You will have to manually add forums to the main menu.

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Its unfortunate that BuddyPress was set up this way, I can see users wanting to have site wide forums more so than group forums, and will want them to be on the slug /forums. A better way would have been for them to use /group-forums or /user-forums for group forums, and /forums for site wide forums. Lets hope an update will rectify this.

I agree. We’re working toward a solution that will allow for both sitewide forums and group-specific forums. This solution has been delayed by the impending release of bbPress 2.0 and the long BP 1.5 dev cycle. Now that both of these milestones have passed, we will be able to work toward a more flexible forum solution. You can follow that development on tickets like https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/3598

@DarrenMooney
Thanks for your post! I was really getting frustrated with the forums setup, but your post helped. Now my only concern is the forum posts etc. showing up in my activity stream. Right now they aren’t. Is anyone else experiencing this and is there a work around?

I followed thoose isntructions and what happened to me was that I can not see the forums at all now. The group forums part have been closed down since day one in the BuddyPressside on the components page. The site wide forums have been isntalled through bbpress. I am using forums as slug. I had a forums page and it letted me to see the forums structures ( not the whole one though with 3 layers of subforums but I think it had to do with theme side problems that should now be fixed with the new update we just got for Salutation theme few hours ago ( still waiting for my admin to uppdate to newest theme update) ). But when I deleted the Forums page and took it away from the Trash as well the forums disapeared totally. Yess I went to Permalinks and saved there even though Permalinks page did not need to be changed or anything, but still did it for the sake of it. Did not help. I can not see the forums at all now.

@darren I deleted the forums page like you said. But, no forum was available in either bbpress or buddypress, even In components “forum” doesn’t show up anymore. Even after deleting and reinstalling through ftp. Why?

And, now that it won’t create it’s own forum page how do I get “forum” under components?

How do you “Double check that bbpress is using “forums” as the Forums base.” ?

That’s the only thing I didn’t do. Otherwise, I did exactly what you said and got a forum-less plugin.

Aside from the confusing method to setup and get site-wide forums working, has anyone resolved the issue of site-wide forums not showing up in the activity stream? I am attempting to get this to work on a new installation ( WP 3.3.1 | BP 1.5.3.1 | bbP 2.0.2 ) without any luck. It is very frustrating and taking up lots of time. I’d rather not enable group forums just to have them in the activity stream. If anyone has site-wide forums only on their BuddyPress installation, working properly and integrated with the activity stream; please offer a step-by-step guide or link to one.